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Tragedy of the Commons: Solutions
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从本节课中
Ecosystems and Climate Change
In this module, we will see that the Earth faces many environmental pressures that result from human exploitation of natural resources. We will also look at the issue of climate change.
与讲师见面
Dr. Jonathan TomkinAssociate Director
School of Earth, Society and Environment
Hi, I'm Jonathan Tompkin from the University of Illinois.
It turns out that the Tragedy of the Commons is not always inevitable.
In particular, the Commons themselves, a shared range land.
Are usually not tragic places. That is to say they are usually not
degraded. If we think of some of the classic places
that have commons, like the Swiss Alps, where Swiss farmers share common pasture
lands. They've actually been sustainably used for
hundreds of years. So, in theory, the tragedy will take
place. But in practice, it doesn't always.
So, what reasons prevent a tragedy from occurring?
There are three broad ways in which we might solve a Tragedy of the Commons.
The first way, we might say is personal action, that is what individuals can do.
The second way is internal governance or sort of social pressures.
What can groups of people to do act, when they act together.
And the third way is some kind of external force.
And we would most normally think about this as a, as a government intervention.
And the government intervention might be through an external regulation, or through
property rights, the courts, and so on. So, we have these three different ways
that we might solve tragedies of the commons.
And in fact, in the real world, we see all three being used to various effect.
The first one personal action is very important, because it ties up with our
responsibility to be good stewards, and ultimately, we really only have power over
ourselves. We don't have that much power over other
people. Personal action has limitations.
Hard on himself, listed out three reasons why he thought that it was unlikely to
succeed in, in solving the problem of the Tragedy of the Commons.
So, I'm gonna read them out now. Firstly, he thought, it is not
psychologically healthy to force people to act against their own interests on the
basis of conscience. Secondly, he said, it discriminates
against people of good conscience who be less successful.
So, you can imagine that if you're not the farmer putting out the extra cow, your
children will be malnourished. They will be the ones who miss out on
education and so on. So, you can see how that's a disadvantage.
And finally he said it won't work in the long run.
People without conscience will be more successful.
And their values will dominate the system. And so again, he would argue that in the
case of his commons that if an individual said, Look, it's not, it's not good for
the commons if I had an extra cow. Then that means your neighbor who will not
be under the same constraint. His value might be what we need to use
what we've got. Because he is going to be more successful,
his values will propagate through the system.
You, you will have less children perhaps, if you are really thinking in Darwinian
sense, or simply less people would admire your point of view.
It will be less successful and create less money, and create less wealth, at least in
the short term. So, there are three different possible
objections that, that Hardin raised about it.
And it does raise moral questions for every individual.
For example, would it be right, if everybody else had two cows and you only
had one. Is it fair for you to add one more cow?
Every action has its own consequences and we have to live with our own morals and
our own ethical obligations. It's not acceptable to do something just
because everyone else is doing it of course.
But you can see from a systematic point of view that it might be that even if there
are many individuals in a system that choose to do the right thing in terms of a
sustainable course, then the commons can still have a tragic outcome because not
everyone shares that moral belief or that position.
So, a collective action is more likely to succeed.
In the case of the farmers who share the commons, you might ask, why don't they
just talk to one another and decide. We can only have two cows each and that's
all the, the commons can support. So, why don't people do that?
It turns out that's what people do, do. When we have a tight knit group or a
society or a group of farmers for example, they can come together and they can come
to a common agreement about what sustainable use is and then they can self
police. And in fact, we see this all the time in
our own lives. We negotiate with our housemates about who
does the cleaning up. We talk to our, our spouses about whose
turn it is to take out the garbage. We can solve a tragedy of the pro, of the
common's problem if the group comes together and communicates.
That's a very powerful way to prevent overuse.
Especially when there are strong group norms about not flouting the will of the
other people in the group, or there's shared respect.
So, Swiss pastures are a very good example of this.
There are many other examples. For example, I have a picture here of,
coordination in paddy farming, where water resources are being shared amongst many
rice farmers. And often, there are other things that are
shared, too, by local groups. For example, forest resources or hunting.
Solving the Tragedy of the Commons by using internal, social regulations has
limits, however. What if we don't know, know our neighbors
very well? An example of this is cod.
Cod was fished by peoples of many different countries.
And we don't always know people from different countries very well.
We don't communicate very well. We don't co-ordinate our actions very
well. In fact, there were three cod wars between
Britain and Iceland, as they competed with one another to use the cod resource.
So, if we're not in the position to use social methods to solve tragedy of the
common problems, we might need to look outside that, that group to an external
regulator. Normally, we think about this as being a
government. Lots of nation states today are very
large. Here in United States we have about
300,000,000 people. We can't socially regulate every problem,
because it's impossible to know every other citizen of the country.
So, you can imagine how the problem gets even harder when we deal with people of
other countries who speak other languages and have other legal systems and moral
points of view. If governments are uncorrupt and have good
sources of information, this can be a good way to solve a Tragedy of the Commons
problem because they have the power to issue, regulations that prevent overuse of
a resource. So, an example that has been tried in the
case of fishing stocks is to limit the amount of fish caught.
There is regulation about the size of fishing vessels, the amount that each
vessel can catch, the dates, tackle used, a long list of approaches have been tried.
So, if governments are reliable, they know what they're doing and they have good
laws, it could be that regulations can solve some Tragedy of the Common problems.
Unfortunately, these requirements that we have.
A reliable government that's not corrupt. And also a reliable government that has
good information about the natural system. Those two requirements are not always met.
And so, in many places in the world, we see Tragedies of the Commons continue
despite laws, on the books that would seem to preclude that possibility.
An example is, deforestation. A lot of countries have reasonable laws to
prevent overuse of forest resources. But because the government is too weak or
too corrupt to enforce those laws effectively.
We see deforestation occur nonetheless. An example of this might be Haiti.
Many western fisheries have collapsed, despite, good government.
That is to say reliable government that is not corrupt and has the strength to
enforce all of its regulations. There's a couple of reasons for this.
Partly there is a lot of unreported illegal fishing that goes on.
If you look at this diagram here you can see that between twenty and 30 percent of
the world's oyster catch is actually, either illegal or unreported.
Or secondly, the government just might not know enough information to make good
regulations. And there's a long history of this that
the government bodies involved don't know for example how many fish there are in the
sea. And if you don't know basic information
like that very well, then you can't make regulations that make a sustainable
resource very well either. And of course, there's another problem.
Many of the tragedies that we are talking about occur in commons that are shared by
governments all around the world. No one organization is responsible for the
world's oceans or the world's atmosphere. So, if there are multiple governments that
run a resource. For example, the world's ocean or the
fisheries, then you see how we just return back to the standard Tragedy of the
Commons model. Each government has its own incentives.
But that's different from all every different nation and the collective view
is different from the individual government view.
I'd just like to finish with a further thought, and that like all human
creations, governments are flawed things, and they're limited in their capacities.
And so, if individuals make poor decisions, then it's possible too that
governments can make poor decisions and make poor regulations.
So, although they are capable of solving some of these problems, we have evidence
that they haven't been able to solve all of these problems.
In the previous lecture, we described the examples where three farmers shared a
field. What if they didn't share the field?
What if instead they did own different parts of it themselves?
In short, there can't be a Tragedy of the Commons if there's no commons.
So, if a resource can be privatized, that is, owned by individuals.
We now see an alignment between an individual interest, and a long term
interest, because they don't want to destroy these resource.
They wanna to keep it for the next year or for the next generation.
At a small scale, we see the evidence of how property rights can be used to prevent
Tragedy of the Commons all the time. Buses are a common resource.
So that if I litter in a bus, that problem is shared amongst all my fellow
passengers. Contrast that to a private vehicle.
If you litter in your own car, you're the person who pays the price.
So, we can see this is an example of how property rights, give us an incentive to
keep our own space clean. Property rights and law, do not always
prevent degradation, however. Reliable and uncorrupted government is
needed to fairly enforce property rights. In this satellite photo, we can see the
border between Haiti on the left and the Dominican Republic on the right separated
by a river. As you can see by looking in the picture,
the Dominican Republic has many more trees.
One of the reasons for this is not that the Dominican Republic has better laws,
but it has better enforcement of laws. So we can see that we still require good
government if we want property rights to success, to successfully combat the
Tragedy of the Commons. A second problem with privatization is not
that everything can be fairly privatized. The whole atmosphere is an excellent
example of this. But it's also, it also can be hard to
privatize things like fish stocks. A good example is recent fish, fishery
regulation in the United States. Individual fishers are given a right to a
certain percentage of the, of, of the stock.
And so, it becomes in their interest to make sure that the total stock doesn't
diminish over time, so that they have fish to collect next year and the year after
that and so on. It appears that this approach is working.
Notice how it's not purely private or purely government, but a mixture of the
two. So, all of these solutions have certain
elements in common. They tend to require good communication
between individuals involved. They also require that we understand the
natural world so we know its limits. We know when it's sustainable.
And in many cases, they require that government be accountable and reliable.
We also see that local problems are most easily fixed.
We know our neighbors. But the transnational problems can be the
hardest. This is why greenhouse warming is a good
example of a difficult problem to solve because it involves every nation on earth
and every individual on earth. So, the world is facing many Tragedy of
the Common problems. Another such problem is arguably the
world's ecosystems. And the fate of individual species in
those ecosystems. In other words, extinction.
Can we use what we just learned to try and understand the future fate of the world's
natural biological systems and the individual species in them.
Produced by OCE Atlas Digital Media at The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
